The No-Cry Discipline Solution

Elizabeth Pantley’s No-Cry parenting manuals first found fame with her No-Cry Sleep Solution published back in 2002. What sleep-deprived, broken-hearted new parent holding their inconsolable baby could resist that title? I’m pretty sure Pantley doesn’t intend absolutely no crying when you follow her parenting manuals, she’s raised four children so she’s likely a realist but undoubtedly the title has been a successful attempt to distinguish her style from the ’cry it out’ baby manuals which dominate much of  parenting advice today. If you found yourself balking at the autocratic nature of the ‘cry it out’ parenting manuals then you’re probably going to struggle with many of the toddler discipline books too and that’s where Pantley’s new book finds its place.

Pantley knows raising children is grueling and frustrating work, whether its putting them to sleep or trying to stop them from conducting diabolical tantrums, her style is all about finding innovative but simple alternatives to the more heavy handed approaches to parenting. She also loves children and she devotes much of the book to assisting you to empathise with your child, the first and most important step in communicating with your child and encouraging positive behaviour.     

I knew the No-Cry Sleep Solution was a good parenting manual because I finished the book feeling revived and re-committed. The worst of parenting is feeling that you’ve run out of ideas and tolerance. As my daughter has emerged from babyhood into strong-willed toddlerhood, and to be fair who doesn’t think they had a strong-willed toddler (except my mother and mother-in-law, what is with all that reinvention of their past experiences as mothers?), my parenting capacity has been tested. The answers to my dilemmas were no longer instinctive the way much of my mothering had been during that first year. My child’s behaviours are unexpected and complicated, she is taking me into areas I hadn’t envisioned and I wasn’t prepared for. No really, who could guess that the combination of his and my genetics equals ‘biter’? We are so not biters, never have been, just ask our mothers, they’ve re-written our entire toddlerhoods. The more overwhelmed and depleted I feel the worse my parenting habits become. No self-flagellation here, I got many things right, but when my energy was flagging I could be a little inconsistent and yes, there was some yelling. And him, well lets’s just say that I was the more resourced parent so as much as I was clueless he was on a whole other level of floundering.

This book is pitched purely at the toddler and pre-schooler stages of parenting and its consequently more appropriate than some of the other behaviour management/discipline/communication parenting books that I’ve read. Whereas with other books I had to spend inordinate amounts of time translating their examples into the ones I was experiencing with my toddler, this book is a virtual recipe book of age-appropriate problems and their solutions. Actually, the last part of the book is exactly like a recipe book with a list of common problems (that managed to cover all of ours) and their suggested solutions. 

Here lies the beauty of this book and one of its few limitations. The book is easy to digest, but it doesn’t offer a new framework for living and understanding yourself. This book is not a way of re-interpreting the world and your place in it but nor is it a book to intimidate the exsasperated parent who may not have the stomach for re-engineering right now. This book’s parenting solutions are readily available – they’re able to be applied on the spot. In fact I tried out a few mid-chapter as the need arose in front of me. The book is also forgiving of toddlers – Pantley is big on accepting that difficult times are part of parenting, and avoiding the soul-searching perfectionism that many other discipline books encourage of parents.

The No-Cry Discipline Solution concentrates heavily on anger management - yours, not your children’s. Pantley includes a range of strategies for helping you identify, avoid and defuse your own anger. If anger is your dark little secret and isn’t it for all parents to some degree, then this book will work you through it. I found this section encompassed a slightly ambiguous message about anger and guilt. For instance on the one hand Pantley stresses that the majority of angry outbursts don’t cause lasting damage to your relationship with your child but on the other she includes the story of a guilty mother’s sorrow over the permanent damage each angry encounter causes her child. As parents’ stories are used throughout the book to support Pantley’s key points it is hard to know how to interpet this mother’s story. Just as discipline as a subject is closely linked to anger, so too is anger tied to guilt. Suppresed anger leads to burn-out and rage and is particularly a problem for women, who often lack the tools for comfortably expressing anger. This book doesn’t delve deeply into this area and if you’re looking for guidelines for the appropriate expression and ownership of your anger as a mother then you may need to supplement this book with some others.      

By far and away my favourite aspect of this book is its framework for parenting toddlers as part of a practice in play. There is no better way to communicate with toddlers than to imbed the message in light-hearted, spontaneous play. Play is to toddlers what security is to babies and this is the underlying landscape Pantley uses in each of the No-Cry books I’ve mentioned. Reading the No-Cry Discipline Solution I came away feeling empowered with my new bag of versatile parenting tricks but also affirmed in my playfulness. It works too – even our infamous nappy change struggles have been conquered. Oh yes, really.   

I wish to disclose that the author approached me to review this book.